LAS VEGAS—Cricket loves ZTE. The fourth-largest smartphone maker "took a chance" on AT&T's new prepaid brand and has delivered a string of "premium economy" phones to the growing Cricket brand, Cricket's CEO Jennifer van Buskirk said. At CES today, the two companies introduced the Grand X Max+, a 6-inch phablet with LTE that sells for only $199 off-contract.

"We've found wide popularity of this much larger form factor smartphone that takes the place of a tablet and a smartphone," Van Buskirk said. "Customers in this space don't want to pay for two different devices and have two different plans."

More no-contract subscribers than mainline AT&T subscribers use their mobile device as their primary form of Internet access, she added, which is also driving demand for large-screen phones.

"Why have a computer that only sits on a desk when you can have a phablet that not only does the same stuff, but can go anywhere you go?" she said.

The Grand X Max + is a variant of T-Mobile's Zmax and Cricket's existing Grand XMax. It has a 6-inch, 720p screen, Android 4.4, a 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor, 16GB of storage with an additional microSD card slot, 13-megapixel and 5-megapixel cameras with 720p video capture, and a quick-charging 3,200mAh battery. The big difference from the existing XMax is LTE on AT&T's various bands.

In person, the Grand X Max+ looks and feels even nicer than its spec sheet. It's big and flat, with a cool, smooth glass back and rounded sides. The screen isn't very high-res, but the colors pop. The 5-megapixel camera will really resonate for selfie-obsessed, young prepaid customers.

"You'll see more and more LTE [on Cricket] throughout the year," Van Buskirk said. "The price points are really starting to come down, and that really allows us to expand LTE across the portfolio."

The X Max+ lacks the latest AT&T LTE features like carrier aggregation and VoLTE, though, because they're just too expensive right now, Van Buskirk said.

"Right now our customers want a reliable network, and coverage everywhere they go. Speed is really a distant third in the hierarchy of needs of our customers," she said. But VoLTE, especially, will come to Cricket "when the cost-benefit equation works," she said.

The Star II's Voice PowerZTE's mantra is "affordable quality," and it's had trouble convincing Americans (and their carriers) that it can make premium phones. Its fancier Nubia line, which it's showing here at CES, doesn't have U.S. frequency bands. The Star II does.

The Star II's special feature is its voice commands, though. ZTE is working with Audience, which does noise-cancellation hardware, and Nuance, which does cloud-based speech recognition, to create a set of offline voice commands which let you launch and manipulate all of the phone's built-in functions. Waiman Lam, ZTE's senior director of wireless, showed how you can play music using voice commands offline; you can also dictate and send text messages without touching the phone once.

"We believe the future is really beyond touch; it's voice control for anyone, anyhow, anything, anywhere, and any time," said Lixin Cheng, the CEO of ZTE USA.

In a lot of ways, this is like the voice commands Samsung and LG have built into their phones. Cheng said ZTE is trying to form an industry organization to create a standard for offline and local application voice commands on Android, an area where Google Now, with its obsession with always-connected cloud commands, falls short.

ZTE doesn't have a U.S. carrier for the Star II yet, but it's perfectly kitted out for AT&T or T-Mobile, so I'd expect to see it on Cricket and MetroPCS. It runs Android 4.4 on a 2.3GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor. It has a 5-inch, 1080p LCD; 16GB of storage with a microSD card slot; and 13-megapixel and 5-megapixel cameras that can capture 4K video. There's a light skin over Android, but it just seems to be some rounded icon designs.

About the Author

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 13 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, hosts our One Cool Thing daily Web show, and writes opinions on tech and society.
Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer. Other than ... See Full Bio

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